mayor michael bloomberg said there were just over 400 homicides in 2012, 100 less than in the previous year. one man knows a lot about that subject, new york city's deputy police commissioner, paul brown, who joins us live right now. mr. brown, congratulations. how have you done it? >> thank you, mainly through 35,000 men and women in uniform, but particularly through something called operation at attack where we send as many uniformed police officers as possible into areas where we have seen spikes and violence, particularly shootings. >> that sounds almost like a back to basics campaign. why was the decision taken to go in that direction? >> well, it started with mayor bloomberg and commissioner kelly coming into the office right after 9/11 with a deep downturn in the economy, less tax revenue. we lost 6000 police officers through attrition, we have 6000 fewer now than we had then. that forced us to take a look at how we deploy officers into the city. instead of dividing them up as we usually did into 76 precincts, we focused better on defining exactly where the most violent crimes w